This week Nick Averwater continues his conversation with Faith Serna, Assistant Band Director and Color Guard Coordinator at Highland High School in Highland, Arkansas. The Highland School District serves several small towns in north central Arkansas, and Faith grew up in the district.

In the last episode, Faith talked about starting, or improving, color guard in a marching band, but in this second part of the conversation we'll switch directions and learn more about her first job in music education as band director in a very small school district in McCrory, Arkansas, a town of 1,500 people, located 70 miles northeast of Little Rock. We'll hear about the challenges she faced early on as the high school band director, and how she was able to more than triple the size of the program in the three years that she was there.

Our conversation was recorded in the Fall of 2024. We've broken it up into two episodes, and this is part two.